


Hecuba's Womb

by Waxwing



Category: Addams Family - All Media Types, The Addams Family (Movies)
Genre: Body Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:54:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25455781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Waxwing/pseuds/Waxwing
Summary: An origin story for Cousin It based on a dream I had about those weird tumors that have hair and teeth inside them.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 15





	Hecuba's Womb

Everyone naturally assumed that Hecuba’s womb would be useless for it’s naturally intended purpose. She wasn’t much bothered by this since she’d never much cared for babies...or nature. Anyway, millions of women can call themselves a mother but she’s one of the few who can call themselves a bonafide medical oddity. Multiple physicians had said so, had used exactly that phrase. After six of such declarations, she’d decided that she was sick of going to hospitals. 

What does she need with a baby anyway? She’s done the math and at least 30 of her cousins would have to die for her to have any chance of inheriting the family fortune and even then she’d have to get married and she doesn’t much care to be married. Mother had died giving birth to her and, until his corpse had turned up in the sub-basement, it had been just her and father and that’s how she had preferred it. There had been correspondence with the rest of the family, of course, and fairly regular visits but they had lived in relative isolation. 

Anyway, she’s a medical oddity because, while her womb may not produce children, it routinely produces...other things. It happened for the first time when she was thirteen (just a few days before her first menstrual period began.) She’d been asleep and been woken around dusk by intense pain in her abdomen. She’s never been able to clearly describe how that pain feels but the best she’s come up with is that it’s like something biting her from the inside or sometimes like something with very sharp claws reaching inside her and roughly attempting to extract whatever it finds. That first time, it went on for a small eternity and she had been certain that she was going to die. 

Obviously she didn’t die but rather came out of her pain-induced stupor feeling strangely placid and... cleansed. Cleansed on the inside anyway, the lower portion of her nightgown was soaked with blood as well as her sheets. Looking down at the grisly sight, her first thought was that she’d better change the sheets before the blood soaks through to the mattress. As she was about to do so, something caught her eye. At first glance, it just looked like an enormous blood clot (about the size of her fist) but upon closer inspection, it appeared to be a wad of human hair. 

She set it in the bathroom sink and attended to the bed linens, still feeling no sense of panic of even mild alarm. After that, she bathed and dressed before going to examine the thing in the sink. A thorough rinse revealed the hair to be the exact same color as hers (pale chestnut brown) and further probing into it reveals a firm yet supple core, a hunk of flesh shaped like a walnut still in the shell. It didn’t feel appropriate to dispose of it so instead, she dried it thoroughly and placed it on her bed in a sort of nest made out of a towel. 

All throughout breakfast she pondered rather or not she’d aught to tell father about it. She hadn’t cleaned up, she’d just exchanged her soiled nightgown for a housedress, and she wondered if the blood on her inner thighs was giving off a smell. If it was, he didn’t remark on it. Father had very good manners. Before she could make up her mind about rather or not to tell him, he’d been kissing her on the cheek and cautioning her against letting anyone into the house while he’s in town on errands. He’d given her similar warnings every time he’d left the house for as long as she could remember. He’d add that even if a man who looked and sounded exactly like him came to the door and begged to be let inside, she was not to unlock it. This had never happened and would never happen but she always assumed that it COULD have or he wouldn’t have worried about it so much...and he did...especially in the weeks leading up to his death. 

After father had left, Hecuba had gone back upstairs to bathe and dress. The thing was still there, in its little nest. It had dried while she’d been downstairs. She put on one of her mother’s old dresses, the ones she’d taken to wearing when her’s had started to get tight, and combed out her hair. All the other girls in the family wear theirs in two neat braids but Hecuba had never learned how to braid and didn’t have any women in the house to do it for her. She sometimes feels a little reproach at father for not even trying but then remembers that she’d never asked him to. 

When she’d finished grooming herself a fancy had struck her and she’d picked the thing up and carefully worked her comb through its hair. It was still quite warm to the touch and seemed to have a little, fluttering pulse. Still conflicted on rather or not the whole matter was worth bringing up to father, she asked herself if this was perhaps a normal part of becoming a woman. At the last family reunion aunt, Octavia had taken her aside (at father’s request, she would later learn) and explained the process to her but she didn’t remember anything like this. Or rather she didn’t THINK she did but she hadn’t really been listening, she’d been eager to return to the ballroom. 

Apart from the presence of the thing, the day had passed in a fairly mundane fashion. She spent the remainder of the morning in the greenhouse harvesting tea leaves to be dried. At one point, she noticed a little, niggling anxiety in the back of her mind and realized that it was because she’d left the thing alone in the house. She went back upstairs, emptied out her mother’s knitting basket save for a wad of yarn which she used to pad the bottom, and put the thing into it. It spent the rest of the morning on the table just inside the greenhouse door, where she could keep an eye on it. When she went inside around noon to fix herself some lunch, she brought it with her. 

Father still hadn’t returned when she went to bed that night. From upstairs, she heard knocking on the front door but dutifully did not answer it. She had brought the thing up with her in its basket and after she finished changing for bed, she took it out and sat awhile petting and fondling it. She held it in her two hands and pressed gently on it’s ‘body’ with both her thumbs, trying to see if she could pinpoint the location of its heart... if it had one. Though she reasoned that it couldn’t very well have a pulse without a heart attached to it, she wasn’t able to locate any. 

She considered simply flushing the little thing down the toilet but, as she held its warm mass and felt its fluttery little pulse, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. It wound up spending the night on the pillow beside hers, swaddled in one of her winter shawls. For some reason, when she awoke the next morning the first thing she did was reach for it only to find it cold and still. She picked it up (it felt heavier now) and felt around for its little pulse. After a while, she felt burning behind her eyes and rubbed them with the back of her hand. When had she started crying? 

She returned the thing to its basket and went downstairs to have breakfast with father. He talked the whole while about how all caves actually lead to a hollow chasm at the center of the Earth, where ‘the secret people’ live. Hecuba feigned interest as best she could but it was hard to pay attention, what with the strange wight that she now felt in her chest. Father spent the rest of the day taking down all the mirrors in the house and throwing them into the old well in the wooded area outback. Hecuba helped him for a while but eventually grew bored. 

She retired to her room for the rest of the day which she spent alternately crying and reading aloud to herself from a book about spiders. Shortly after father came up to say goodnight and inform her that he’d be spending the rest of the evening locked in the root cellar and was not to be disturbed, Hecuba took the knitting basket and went back out into the greenhouse. As she sat in the moonlight, holding the little thing one last time, she found herself crying again. When the tears finally stopped, she picked up her spade, placed the thing on the stone floor in front of her, and split it in two. Inside there was blood and puss and a few little pearls that had the consistency of teeth but no heart. She buried its remains in the garden box with the herbs but kept the little pearls. 

By the time of the event in question, Hecuba had accumulated an entire mason jar full of hard, white pellets, some resembling teeth more than others. Eventually, father went missing and returned after about a month as a corpse in the subbasement. Hecuba had yet to tell him her secret and was never going to get the chance. After that, it was just her in the house. There were occasional visits with relatives and of course, annual family reunions but apart from that, she spent her time alone. Occasionally she would hear pounding on the back door or basement door at night and sometimes she’d be tempted to answer but she never did. 

The things came out of her with predictable regularity, at least once a month, usually during her menstrual period. They varied in size and complexity; if they were like the first one or smaller she’d simply cut them open right away. Those ones usually had nothing to write home about inside except more of those little pearls which she kept for her collection. Some of the larger ones didn’t have pulses and so got the same treatment but the ones that did would be kept in the basket as the first one until they pulses went away, then she’d dissect them. She become more meticulous about it, employing the surgical equipment that she found in the bag that father used to take with him when he went away during the day. 

By her 32nd year, she’d accumulated an extensive collection of human-like parts that she’d found inside the things (teeth, bones, a single eye one time, etc) that she kept in jars along her bedroom wall. Then, one day, she began to suffer horrible pains in her abdomen. It went on for about a week by the end of which she was too drained to get out of bed. She was awoken the next morning by a breathtaking burning, tearing sensation in her lower abdomen, just at the top of her pelvis. The blood came first (so much she’d have sworn she didn’t have any left) and then... it came out. 

It was about the size of a Yorkie except with no limbs and it squirmed and made a little kitten-like mewing noise. When she recovered enough strength to stand, she took it to the bathtub and began to languidly rinse it off. Like the others, it was covered in hair the same color as hers but unlike the others, it wriggles around a great deal. Eventually, she found that it was squirming in response to the cold water and that it was soothed by warm water. She continued rinsing and combing her fingers through its hair. 

It seemed she would never get all the gore out and eventually she fell into a sort of trance as the result of her exhaustion and the warm water and the repetitiveness of her task. She was startled into full wakefulness, however, when one of her fingers slipped into an orifice. Initially, she jerked her hand back but then returned to investigate. There were no lips or teeth but she could feel the ridges of gums (she had a little jaw bone in one of her collection of jars) and a tongue that curled around her finger in the manner that the tongues of kittens do when they’re suckling from their mother. She investigates further to find a large cluster of little, black eyes (reminiscent of those of a spider) above the mouth. 

The eyes seem very sensitive to light as it lets out a pained squeak when she parts the hair to expose them. When, finally, the hair is clean, she wraps the thing in a towel and puts it in the basket. As she goes about changing the bed linens and washing, the thing continues making squeaking and agitated chittering noises. At a loss for how to feed it, she winds up soaking a rag in warm milk and letting the thing suck on it until it seems sated. She is able to go about her day as she usually would after that, only having to feed it twice more, once around noon and again int he evening. At bedtime, it begins mewling again and doesn’t stop until she takes it into bed with her and holds it the way a child would a stuffed animal. 

She finds herself being soothed to sleep by the little purring noises that it makes that night and every night after until It grows big enough that he needs his own bed.


End file.
